The following note from Anne Berkeley concerns the Korean censorship of all blogs emanating from Blogspot.com, not just this one. Personally, the idea of loading the video of a beheading onto a blog site turns my stomach. Yet I myself have in the past provided links to the website of the Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), whose site documented the execution of women in that country under the reign of the Taliban. And I took my children to see Fahrenheit 911, which itself includes footage of a beheading.* There are contexts in which such material is appropriate and possibly even necessary.

 

As a writer, I’m a First Amendment absolutist. The Korean blocking of these sites is disturbing & ultimately stupid. Given that I’ve never written a word here about either North or South Korea, it’s completely galling.

 

Ron,

I read your blog from time to time because I'm interested in poetry and your take on things outside the mainstream. I like the way you unpick poems and listen to the sounds and intervals. I relish your chastisements of the School of Quietude.

But I'm not writing to flatter you.

Do you realize your blog has just been banned in South Korea? It wouldn't surprise you about China, perhaps - but Korea is supposed to be a modern democracy, with freedom of speech enshrined in its constitution. It's the most wired and internet savvy nation on earth. Ah but.

It all started on 24 June when the video of Kim Sun-il's murder started circulating. The Korean Ministry of Information and Communication (Orwellian or what?) closed access to internet sites showing it. They could only manage it by the bluntest of means - by closing access to the hosts.

As you are hosted by Blogspot, and they are one of the hosts of an offending site, Korean access to Silliman's Blog is denied. The same is true for blogger, blogs and Typepad. That's hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of blogs denied to Koreans, some of them even blogging from Korea (though most Koreans use Cyworld). Some Koreans can manage to access blocked sites by using a proxy server such as unipeak.com, but that crashes at busy times. And doubtless that will be blocked too when the government realizes. Probably more foreigners than Koreans will suffer in practice, and there is no love lost for Americans in Korea.

There are two petitions doing the rounds. Neither is wholly satisfactory. This one accuses the government of being fascist, but I signed it anyway. This one sums up the situation quite well. The final sentence of the second paragraph is problematic for me because the situation's much more nuanced than that, but I signed it too.

Korea has a history on this, frequently blocking sites concerning N Korea, and gay sites.

OK, so there are lots of far more desperate human rights issues round the world, but I thought you might be interested since your blog is involved, and be able to spare a moment to sign  one or both petitions.

There's an interesting and informative article in Asia Times (30 June). There is more of the western angle in OhmyNews - MIC: Burning Down the Internet posted on 2 July. CNN picked up the story on 30 June, but they don't seem to have realized quite how blunt an instrument was being used. Otherwise there's been a deafening silence.

When the FKTU expressed dissent, they were quickly shouted down, as Robert Koehler reported in his blog on 25 June.

You can read more about the constitutional position here. Free speech is a constitutional right, but the devil is in the detailed regulations. They seek to "protect minors".

I don't have a particular line on this - I'm English, I like Korean poetry, I enjoy reading some Korean blogs, I feel involved, I get outraged. (I only happened on this interest in Korea through the internet, through reading a Korean poem on a Canadian blog, of all things.)

I don't believe in censorship anyway, but it astonishes me that so many innocent blogs on my own regular reading list are suddenly prohibited to Koreans. And on your own blogroll, there are masses of poetry and poetics sites, all now banned along with blogspot or one of the other proscribed hosts. I gave up counting when I got as far as Li Bloom, and there were already 17 of them!

Forgive me for writing at such length, and out of the blue. I don't know what else is to be done. Maybe a protest to Blogspot? Do they have a news section? Not having a blog myself, I haven't worked out how to contact them about this sort of thing. But at the heart of this is the issue of censorship, which I believe is wrong in principle. That blogs like your own are affected by the fallout makes it worse, but ironically, may help to bring pressure on the Korean government.

This sort of thing has implications for all of us online in the free world.

with best wishes

Anne Berkeley
Cambridge UK

 

 

* Tho at such a distance and so quickly that neither of my boys could identify where it occurred once the film was over.